


Someone in the Crowd

by quondam



Category: Mass Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 03:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9157144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quondam/pseuds/quondam
Summary: The war is over, but on Earth, Garrus is unable to avoid someone from Commander John Shepard's past.This was a very old prompt that asked for a world in which both John and Jane existed as separate characters.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I have a ton of stories I began writing years ago and never finished, so I've been revisiting some of them. I have no idea how active this fandom is anymore, but if you'd like more please let me know!

The first time Garrus sees her, she’s fresh off a shuttle from some place called New York. A place, he’s told, that was held down to the very end thanks to her. She leads the recovery mission of the Citadel, formally called Search and Rescue, but twenty-one day and night cycles since the end of the war, and there’s no hope that anyone is alive on the hunk of metal. It’s she who commands the rag-tag group of soldiers of all species. She who keeps the peace very much like his Commander had. And at the end of a long day of digging through wreckage, it’s she who calls for the crew of the Normandy when she finds the savior of the galaxy, dead and cold. It’s then he learns her name is Shepherd. Jane Shepherd. It’s funny, that coincidence.

  
The funeral for his friend comes and she’s there again. Captain Shepard, they call him now instead of Commander, a belated promotion earned in wartime. Funerals are a mix of tradition, most of it foreign to him, but the sentiments are the same. Honor the dead. Shepherd is out of her armor and in her uniform, pressed like there wasn’t a war on not so long ago, like the rest of the world isn’t starving and cold and suffering. There’s a flag draped, music playing, and alongside the other distinguished soldiers, she raises her rifle, aims to the sky and shoots. Again. Again.

  
An hour after the service for John ends and his body is lowered into the ground, Garrus is in the nearby make-shift bar for servicemen. It may be Alliance run, but they’re all welcome, though it isn’t much, what with it in the shell of an old storefront. The long counter, its registers still bolted on but unused, has become the bar, and where there’s usually stools for patrons, it’s standing room only. A man, no, a boy—even Garrus can tell the human is incredibly young, probably younger than they would have ever allowed into service not in such wartime—passes out shots of liquor to anyone and everyone. Garrus takes one, and even though it likely isn’t dextro, he doesn’t mind. At least, he doesn’t mind anymore than he minds the fact that the shot of liquors served in a cracked and chipped coffee mug, the others not fairing better in their glassware.

  
Ahead of him, there’s a commotion, and then someone rising up on that bar top. He’s unsurprised to see the fiery red hair of the woman that’s been haunting him all over this planet since the Normandy crept back towards the Sol system. Where her uniform had been crisp, it’s now wrinkled, unbuttoned and untucked, exposing the whites of her somewhat stained undershirt, faint markings of old blood and sweat. She holds up two drinks, one a former wine glass with jagged and broken stem, the other an actual shot glass. Everyone else around him mirrors her, and for no particular reason than not wanting to be left out, Garrus does as well. He watches.

  
“To the Commander!” She shouts, and if there had been anyone talking a second ago, they’re silent now. “To the man who saved the galaxy and gave his life so others didn’t have to. May we all dream of being half the man and soldier he was.” shepherd tips her head in the direction of Garrus and for the very first time, their eyes meet. “To his crew, loyal and fearless as they always will be.” Pausing, she returns to address the crowd again. “To those that remain. May we rebuild what was lost, and mourn for those no longer with us.” Shepherd draws the half of a wine glass nearer to her lips, and when she speaks again, she’s no longer as confident as a moment earlier. “To John, fellow soldier, inspiration to us all, and my friend. May he never be forgotten.”

  
And with that, finally, does she drink down the shot of liquor as the rest of the room knocks back theirs as well. Garrus takes his drink and watches as a soldier helps Shepherd down from the counter. He pushes through the throngs of people, fighting for what little space there is, but there she is, setting the still full shot glass down on the counter top. She’s scribbling with a pen on a small piece of cardboard with rough and singed edges. Something about John, something about KIA, and when she’s through, she sets it before the shot on the bar top, where it will remain, he chooses to believe, until the end of time. Shepherd lifts her head when her work is done.

  
“You doing okay?”

An easy answer to an easy question. No, he’ll never be okay. “Yeah.”

The look she gives him is disbelieving, the lowering of a brow, squint of an eye. She’s seen through him, but has the decency not to say otherwise.

“You knew him?” Garrus asks, if only to stop her from asking him something else.

“Long time ago,” Shepherd says, “went through N-school together.”

“Ah,” he sighs, small talk already making him weary given the events of the day.

Motioning to the soldier turned bartender, she gets a refill of her glass, takes a long sip until it’s empty once again. She smiles after swallowing. “We had a bet, back then. On who would get their N7 first.”

“What’d you wager?”

Her head shakes and she hands off her glass to the bartender, finished. “Wager wasn’t important, it was pride, mostly. Hey, do you mind if we get out of here? This haze is giving me a headache.”

Part of him wants to decline, to spend the night on his own. The rest of the crew had parted ways after the funeral, not very much unlike the first time their friend and Commander had met an untimely death, and a night to himself had been what he’d been planning. Shepherd, though, she seemed to want the company, so he would agree to it. For her sake, he told himself, even as he nodded and she led the way out into the chill of the night.

They walk for sometime, shoulder to shoulder though space between, and neither saying a word. It’s comfortable, and maybe, he thinks, this is better than being alone. “Who won?”

“Who do you think?”

“Did he gloat too much?”

Shepherd nudges his arm with a bit of force. “Fuck that smug bastard. I won. By seventeen days. And he had it coming, you know? He used to go on, for-fucking-ever, that he was the Hero of Elysium and I was the Butcher, that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with a nickname like the Butcher—bad PR and all that. I wasn’t about to let him have something else to hold over my head. N7s, we all tend to be pretty stupid, looking for trouble. But I spent that entire year throwing myself into every dogfight that came around, just to make sure.”

Garrus feels himself smiling, even laughter bubbling in his chest at the thought. Somethings never change, John had always hated to lose a bet, even down to the end.

“He did get to be Spectre, I’ll give him that. Sent me a message about it before the vids were even out.” Shepherd’s head shakes, but her lips pull into a grin. “Such a smug bastard.”

“That sounds about right—wait, the Butcher—that was you?” He’s heard that story, seen the vids, and now that he thinks on it—really thinks on it—he knows her face.

“Fuckin’ Batarians,” she grits through her teeth.

“Fucking Batarians,” Garrus confirms. There’s a history between her and the species, he knows somewhere on the fringes of his mind, some gossip he once read on the extranet, but the notion slides from his head with the sideways smile she gives him.

“What are you doing with the rest of your night?” Shepherd asks, stopping in their tracks.

He halts only a step or two off, turning back to her. A brow plate raises in a silent question.

She smiles, a look reminiscent of the kind John used to give when he was about to invite him on some trouble. “I’ve got a place…”

 

* * *

 

 

A place, it certainly is. It’s off base for Alliance, but not by much. The bright lights of the base camp’s perimeter and security check points filter down the streets, engines of ships barely humming in the distance. Garrus follows her up the half set of stone stairs out front of the building, and it’s the cleanest one on the block, looking almost as if it had been untouched by the war around them.

Shepherd keys a code into her omnitool and the front door releases with a series of clicks, pops, and whirrs. She offers him entrance first and follows behind, repeating the process until they’re sealed well within.

“Belonged to some very posh family, or so I’m told,” she begins while leading the way down the hall and then down a curved staircase, not one, but two floors. “They couldn’t expand above ground anymore, so they started to build down.”

They’re underground, even if the built in lighting that Shepherd clicks on room by room via her omnitool, suggests otherwise. There’s nary a window in sight. It would be claustrophobic to some, he thinks, but it reminds him of the Normandy. A comfort in contained spaces.

“Just how did you find this place? And how have you managed to keep it to yourself?”

“Mm,” Shepherd hums, pulling a half empty bottle from a shelf of similarly colored liquors, pouring herself a night cap at a white stone counter. “Heard about it from a friend who calls London home, said he read about it on the net couple of years ago and in the middle of it—I mean, right in the thick of it with a couple of marauders and those screaming bitches,” her hand raises, glass and all, generally motioning to the size of the beings she refers to, “he stumbles on past this place’s front door. Found it on accident, really.” Shepherd sips her drink, swallows it down. “Anyway, he tried to get into it himself, but turns out this place is locked down pretty tight. Of course it is, right? So I spent three nights—three fuckin’ nights—calling in favors and trying to brute force a code into this place and no damn luck.”

Her drink’s empty and she pours another, halfway to her mouth when she stops, looks at him. “Can I get you one?”

“No, no,” Garrus waves her off.

“Eventually I just had someone track the family down—and would you believe it? They’re all alive, I mean god bless, but they’re all alive and just been sitting pretty at one of their other properties on some small island off the coast of who-the-fuck-knows-where, hiding out while the rest of us are deep in the shit. So I may have made some promises, told some lies about how Alliance high command needed to set this place up as a headquarters for the time being and they’d all be rewarded heavily with whatever their heart desired. And boom, they’re forwarding me the access I need, I’m in.”

It’s easy to forget the way the world, the galaxy, really is down here while he’s in the subterranean with her. It isn’t just the cleanliness of the place or the fact that he’s sure if he looked in cabinets and cupboards he’s sure he’d find boxes of food untouched, a closet full of clothes worth more than his first apartment, it’s the way she is.

She’s animated, alive with spirit, and it strikes him that she’s much like this home: standing strong despite what has happened around her. Garrus is sure if he’d met her a few years earlier before everything and everyone had gone to complete shit, this woman would speak with the same energy, the same laugh always on the verge of erupting out of her. He’s envious of it.

“Hey Vakarian,” Shepherd says from down the hallway and it wakes him from his thoughts. She glances back over a shoulder while sliding her uniform coat off. “Wanna fuck?”

There’s no sputtering, no hesitation, and no words. Garrus retraces her steps towards where she waits just inside the doorway of a bedroom, silently stripping herself of the remaining clothing keeping her covered. Her eyes lock with his, only ever breaking when she pulls the undershirt up over head, her hair left mussed and tousled in the process. When they meet again she’s down to just the undergarments he knows from the Normandy locker rooms, but they aren’t what keeps his attention because that’s the rest of her. And Spirits, she grabs it.

Garrus shuts the door with the heel of his boot and before he can even register the thud of its closure in his ears, Shepherd has her mouth pressed to his, her hands otherwise occupied in peeling off his own clothing. She does it with a dexterity that makes him wonder how many other turians she’s been with, not that the number matters. He’s thankful for the seemingly familiarity she carries, guiding them both in the way of things. He’s read fornax, seen some vids, but putting it into practice is easier said than done.

“You ever fuck John?” Shepherd asks when they’re both down to nothing. She pushes him back against the door and sinks to her knees, employing both her mouth and hand in easing his cock out from behind its plates. He almost misses the question, so lost in the heat of her tongue and then her mouth when she welcomes him inside her.

“What?” He gasps, and regrets saying anything at all when she has to let him slip from between her lips to answer.

“Did you ever fuck him? That guy,” and she licks along the underside of him, from root to tip, “would’ve screwed anything that moved.”

His hand finds her hair, guiding her head back but she needs no instruction or encouragement. Shepherd’s already eager enough on her own, the sounds coming from her mouth down right delightful as he shuts his eyes.

“No. I never—No.”

She doesn’t reply right away, instead preferring to tease him, taking him deep and sucking.

“That’s a pity,” Shepherd finally answers, and when she stands back up her lips are slick with saliva. “Cause I fucked him,” her hand finds his own, pulling him further into the room. Shepherd hops up onto the end of a wide, low sitting dresser that’s a perfect hip height for him, and spreads her legs. “And he’s yet to be outdone.”

He’s surprised by how much that thought inspires the thought of jealousy in him, and he isn’t sure of which side it’s on: jealous that his commander and friend had been inside this stranger before him even as she currently offers herself, or jealous that he hadn’t gotten the chance to share a bed with John.

Shepherd tugs on his cowl and he hunches forward, obliging her the kiss in her human custom, while she simultaneously guides one of his hands between her thighs to her waiting cunt. If he’d thought her mouth had been hot and inviting, it had only been the flicker of a flame compared to this.

“How’d he fuck you?” Garrus inquires with almost a growl.

It sets off the biggest smile he’s seen on her yet, eyes wide and lashes fluttering.

“You want to know how he had me?”

Shepherd wraps her legs loosely around the curve of his small waist, crossing at his backside, then lies herself down along the length of the piece of furniture she’s already perched upon. She manipulates him just so with her legs alone, pulling him closer and at just the perfect angle so he feels the tip of his cock rubbing against her soaking wet heat.

“If I told you just every single way he fucked me, would you promise to do the same?”

Her words are punctuated with both of their gasps as he uses a hand on her hip for steadiness and pushes inside her, rough and quick, without any warning.

“Fuuuuck,” Shepherd breaks the silence first, her back arching off the wood beneath her, breasts on display as she heaves a breath in and out. “I didn’t know—“

But he doesn’t let her continue, simply pulls out and repeats the process with more gusto than before now that he’s sure he can fit inside her, and Shepherd echoes her word from a moment before.

“Fuck.”

Her hands find her nipples, palming the whole of her breasts as she twists and teases them as he pounds into her. The jiggle of her flesh is intoxicating to watch.

Garrus takes hold of one of her legs around him, instead shifts it over his shoulder and he slides just that much deep into her. Shepherd moans like he hasn’t heard out of her yet.

“Jesus—shit—right—“

It feels as if he has something to prove, not that he hasn’t always brought his A-game to trysts such as this, but outfucking his former commander isn't an opportunity he’s about to back away from.

He slides her leg back around him, then an arm under her waist and back, pulling her up until she’s wrapped about him while still inside of her. Shepherd never misses a beat, encircling her legs tightly around hips and arms about his neck, her mouth biting and sucking at the tender flesh of his neck as he moves them towards the bed.

Garrus is loathe to let her go, but the two of them find the mattress and in only a few quick motions Shepherd is on her knees, ass up, and chest to the bed. He slides home inside her again and watches her grasp the sheets so tight her knuckles go white as she pushes back into him. It’s antagonistic, like she fucks how she fights, and Garrus expects no less from a woman such as she.

Shepherd reaches a hand back between her thighs but he stops her after only a moment, catching the hint, and replaces her fingers with his own. He doesn’t stop, especially not when her moans and whimpers grow louder, the movement of her hips getting frantic. Garrus knows that feeling, it’s the same one building in him, constantly on the precipice.

“Come on Vakarian,” she goads from below, “fuck me like I’m your last.”

It’s encouragement he didn’t think he needed, but what really gets him is Shepherd’s shout and shudder as she finally cums, squeezing him tight internally. Garrus climbs over her, flattening her body closer to the bed as his body presses and drags itself against her much softer, smoother flesh. It’s those final few strokes that get him, drive him over the verge until he releases inside her.

Fuck. It’s an orgasm that he feels like he’s been holding onto for months. Years.

It’s pleasantly numbing, the whole thing, and while he’s careful not to press his full weight to her, her warmth from below is a comfort. Garrus licks at the back of her neck, the salt of sweat there, and Shepherd merely pants, and then hums, eyes shut with her cheek pressed to the bed.

“I didn’t know,” she revisits her thought from earlier, “you had that in you.”

Garrus nips the flesh at her shoulder, pushing himself up.

“I mean, I hoped,” Shepherd continues, “but didn’t know.”

It isn’t much later when the two of them have abandoned the bed, only just dressed. Shepherd had rifled through drawers in the walk in closet until she’d found underwear and a tanktop belonging to the former missus of the household. They’re finer than what she’d had on before, with gauzy lace detailing the edges and a softness to the pristine fabric that he doesn’t even need to touch to imagine it under his fingers. For him, however, he simply pulls back on some of what he’d worn into the home. Garrus doesn’t have much hope of finding turian friendly clothing buried away in that closet.

It’s as she’s going through some of the packaged food in the kitchen that he takes the time to look around and begins to notice the marks she’s left behind on this place. His quick cursory glance around when they’d arrived had yielded him the broader strokes: a beautiful home with modern luxuries according to earth’s standards, but Shepherd had weaseled her way in among it all, turned it into something of her own.

Ration packs are stacked along the far wall of a kitchen counter, unwashed cups and bowls in the sink. A smear of gun grease stained the white carpeting in front of a matching couch. An armored wrist cuff sat in pieces on the coffee table.

“Doesn’t anyone wonder where you sleep?” Garrus asks, Shepherd looking up with a forkful of formerly freeze dried noodles half in her mouth, as though she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone.

“Mmhmmph,” she chews, shaking her head as she swallows. “I don’t think anyone cares. Not with everything else that’s going on. Say I don’t check in to my quarters every night this week—who’s going to call me on it? You think high command is keeping track of my comings and goings?”

He’s forgotten how big the world is out there. Had he not shown up regularly when the Normandy was docked on the citadel, he knows John might have inquired into it, just as a precaution. But they’d been a small ship then and John had known all their faces, of which there weren’t many.

“I wonder…” Shepherd muses from where she sits at the counter in her underwear, in between bites of food. She doesn’t finish the thought.

“Wonder what?”

It’s a coy smile she gives him, and he swears he catches a blush on her cheeks.

“You know, and I bet John never told you this, but I was supposed to be in his place.”

“In his place? Where?”

She reaches into a drawer, fumbling, then pulls out an old fashioned pen and pad of paper, scrawls some words on it. Jane Shepherd. John Shepard.

“You wouldn’t believe the shit we got in N school with our names, I think we got reprimanded more for other people’s mistaking us for one another than we actually used it to abuse the system. Anyway, that mission out to Eden Prime was mine—only some shit who can’t read well enough sees his name first, A before H, and I’m showing up for duty only to find out they’ve already gone and left without me, John in my place.”

He’s heard that story a million times, how John Shepard had come to be the first human Spectre, how he’d met Saren. Only, it had been a story meant for someone else: Jane. There’s the metal clink of her setting her fork down, bowl still more than half full. Jane stares at the paper, the pair of names.

“I’m not…” she sighs, can see her working through the thoughts in her head by the way her forehead crinkles and her tongue runs over her teeth under her lips. “I’m not jealous,” and she braves a glance up to Garrus for a moment, “because I’ve read it all, heard it all from everyone and even John himself—I know the things you guys did were impossible.”

It hits him all at once: the pain of the grief for the people they lost along the way, the fatigue from the nonstop work demanded of them, all of it. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone. “And yet?” He prompts her.

“And yet…” She laughs, not the lively vibrant kind from her before, but tinged with bitterness. “I feel like it was stolen from me.”

Despite the struggle, Garrus already knows he wouldn’t have given up his place with Shepard for anything in the galaxy.

“And I feel like John’s dead because of a fucking clerical error.”

He’d been wrong, he realizes in that moment as Jane sits in front of him, absently staring at the counter as tears threaten to spill. She wasn’t untouched by this war, no matter how loud she laughed or how hard she saluted the dead. Garrus approached and she didn’t stir, not until he touched her cheek, lifted her gaze to him.

“He wouldn’t have wanted you to die in his place,” and that’s the truth, he knew John well enough to know that much.

Shepherd says nothing, breathes deep and wipes her eyes with the hem of her top, and returns to the food that’s turning cold.

He stays till just before first light, slipping out of their private, unassuming fortress with a couple of hours of sleep in them both. The walk back towards base is slow and silent, and for once it feels as if the rest of the world is also asleep, calmed down and quiet.

Garrus, he’d been sticking around planetside in the hope of finding what had been left of his friend and commander, and with him finally laid to rest… there’s a spot on a ship out of there with his name on it. Palaven is calling, truth be told it’s been calling for quite some time now, and all that unfinished business he’s been holding onto feels gone, complete.

“If you tell anyone about that single tear,” she says, jesting, but it’s a thin veil, “I’ll have your balls for it.”

Garrus smiles to humor her, but also because he can tell she needs it. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.”

They’re at an impasse in the courtyard, on past their second security checkpoint, when Shepherd offers her hand to him. It’s formal, especially for two people who had been unclothed and tangled around one another only hours earlier.

He takes it, squeezes it hard, and that’s their goodbye.

She goes left, he goes right.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s halfway through the ship’s first night cycle on his way back to Palaven when he receives a message. He thinks it’s got to be her, even wonders how it’ll be to see such a similar name to his former commander in his inbox again. It’s not though, just an automated message he automatically filters to the trash. It’s like that for the next few weeks even, his head plagued with dreams and nightmares of the last few years, and in between all of those… thoughts of a human he said goodbye to back on Earth. She’s a popular topic at first, coming to him at night when he needs a good fantasy to get him going. But time passes and though the memory doesn’t fade, life goes on.

He sits a desk job for months that turn into a year or two, feels himself getting soft around the edges. Garrus begins to wonder when the feel of a keyboard started to become more familiar than that of a gun again. It’s a comfortable life, though, and there’s something to be said about coming back to the same bed every night, something about having dirt beneath your feet.

There’s a girl, an upstanding Turian woman he’s seen a few times, and though he likes her it feels wrong that his father approves of the match, however early in its stages of infancy the relationship is. Making his father happy isn’t something Garrus is familiar with. He could live with it though, he thinks, could settle down and let his name fade a little more into obscurity year by year until Garrus Vakarian turns no heads at all. It might be nice to be invisible again.

He’s off world, running glorified errands for the Turian hierarchy with the new version of the council when he walks into a bar. Garrus is already settled in his seat with a drink when he realizes just how loud one particular group at the far end of the place is. It’s mostly Alliance, he realizes, with a few other species thrown in, and he envies the raucous energy they have. There was a party once in those last days on the Citadel with the whole crew, and he doubts this could hold a candle to the one he’s thinking of.

Though he tries to tune them out, he can’t help but overhear some of the conversation. Something about promotions, something about Spectres. He’d dreamt for that for himself once, what feels like forever ago, and when he closes his eyes he can almost feel what that hope had felt like swollen in his chest. They’re gone before he thought they would be, presumably moving on to the next spot. A glimpse of red hair catches the corner of his eye, but he simply downs the last of his drink, pays his tab, and aims himself in the general direction of the temporary quarters set up for him.

This place, it’s nothing like the Citadel. It’s small, tiny in fact, compared to that old beast he’d called home before it had been torn to pieces. There’s no familiar tap of Keepers on the metal walkways, but still the same smell of artificial air that comes with all places big enough to be called space stations. Cities floating through space.

“Hey!” Someone shouts, but it’s not threatening so Garrus doesn’t react with apprehension, instead just stills and turns back in the direction of the voice.

Shepherd isn’t how he remembers, but still he knows her. The hair’s longer, plaited over a shoulder, and a deep scar still angry and almost as red as her hair cuts through her brow. They’ve got ways to fix that, he knows, improved medi-gel and skin weaves to prevent or fix the worst of scars, but he isn’t surprised she wears it like a badge of honor. She’s got her uniform coat off, dangling by her fingers, and he sees the Spectre logo emblazoned on a shoulder of it. It’s fresh, new.

“I’ve got my own ship now,” Jane says, “and as much authority as anyone can get this side of the galaxy." She takes another step, closes the distance, and it’s like there’s been no time between them at all. “Want to go shoot some stuff?”

 

 

 


End file.
